Rogue Science and Biased Media

This has not been a good week for the climate alarmists. Nor has it been a good week for the mainstream media. The MSM has proven once again that much of the media is no longer interested in objectivity, fact, and even-handedness, but is instead into advocacy journalism, censorship, and agenda-pushing.

This becomes crystal clear when we consider the startling revelations coming from the leaked climate change emails. This scandal – now dubbed Climategate – is getting bigger by the day, but you would not even know it was happening if you relied only on the MSM.

Once again it is the alternative media, especially the blogosphere, that is breaking these sorts of stories, and giving them the proper coverage they deserve. Indeed, not only is the MSM deliberately censoring this story about the leaked emails, but it continues to jump on any bit of climate alarmism it can find.

Thus while it has basically ignored Climategate, it is all agog over another story claiming that climate change is even worse than we thought. All the usual suspects ranging from the Age to the ABC to SBS have been flogging this story, while steadfastly ignoring the much more important story of scientific fraud and deception.

The Melbourne Age for example is running with banner headlines in its coverage of more gloom and doom: “Warming diagnosis: beyond worst case”. Wow, it really is the end of the world. And yet the real story, of bogus science and falsified data is being completely bypassed by these media outlets.

Just imagine a similar story of corruption, cover-up, and deception involving some conservative or religious group. The MSM would be beating such a story to death. But our politically correct MSM is only interested in pushing its own leftist agendas, not in proper news coverage.

Meanwhile, back at the alternative media, each new day brings out even more sordid details about Climategate. Andrew Bolt has conveniently offered us some of these leaked emails, and boy are they explosive. Let me here just reprint the list as presented by Bolt in today’s Herald Sun:

FIDDLING DATA: “Hide the decline”
Phil Jones tells Mike Mann and others how he made his data show warming:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Mick Kelly, Professor of Climate Change at Jones’ university, on hiding recent cooling:
“Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”
A CRU programming code for dealing with tree-ring data:
“Uses corrected MXD but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”
From green entrepreneur Adam Markham to the CRU, asking for better propaganda:
“(WWW Australia) are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.”

FAITH, NOT SCIENCE: “This is all gut feeling”
Phil Jones shows his faith:
“I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”
Phil Jones to his CRU staff:
“I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like – half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!”
From Phil Jones to Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, now of the US University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, saying he cannot believe the Medieval Warm Period really was warmer:
“Bottom line – there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years … this is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.”
From Phil Jones to Mike Mann, on the death of Australian sceptic John Daly:
“In an odd way this is cheering news!”

COVERING UP: “Destroy the emails”
Phil Jones warns Mike Mann that Steve McIntyre and Prof Ross McKittrick, two sceptics who first debunked Mann’s “hockey stick”, are now wanting to check CRU data:
“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone … We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
From Phil Jones to Mike Mann and others:
“PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”
Phil Jones to American climatologist and IPCC lead author Benjamin Santer:
“I did get an email from the FoI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!”
Phil Jones to Mike Mann, just three weeks after an FOI request from sceptic David Holland:
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?”

SILENCING SCEPTICS: “Beat the crap out of him”
Ben Santer on a sceptic :
“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him.”
Phil Jones on cheating on deadlines to sneak warmist material into the IPCC:
“Ammann/Wahl – try and change the Received date! Don’t give those sceptic something to amuse themselves with.”
Tom Wigley on ousting the editor of Geophysical Research Letters (achieved):
“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse sceptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”
Phil Jones to Mike Mann on keeping two sceptics’ papers from the IPCC:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Mike Mann on removing the editor of Climate Science (achieved):
“How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that anti-greenhouse science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on).”
Mike Mann to the CRU’s Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, on blocking sceptics’ comments on his Real Climate website:
“We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not …”

OUR THEORY ISN’T WORKING! “Where the heck is global warming?”
IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth privately tells Mann, Santer, Wigley, Jones and leading alarmists such as Stephen H. Schneider and James Hansen that the data doesn’t show what their climate models predicted:
“… where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. … The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

And there are thousands of these emails! Several good books – and movies – could be churned out over this incredible story. The truth is, the alarmists have been caught with their pants down. Science is not the sacred cow it pretends to be. It is made up of fallible, tempt-able, and corruptible people, just like every other profession.

Indeed, many have written about this over the years. We should have listened to them more closely. For example, back in 2001 Daniel Greenberg wrote an important volume entitled, Science, Money, and Politics. In it he documented how science is often far from the pristine, neutral and objective enterprise we tend to think it is.

I wrote a review of this book which can be found here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2004/08/22/a-review-of-science-money-and-politics-political-triumph-and-ethical-erosion-by-daniel-greenberg/

Let me feature just one paragraph from that review: “Science in many ways has now replaced religion and philosophy as the most respected source of knowledge and wisdom. Today when a scientist speaks, people listen. This is all part of the tendency to see science as saviour, and to regard scientists as saints. Put on a white lab coat, and people assume you speak the truth. After all, science is about facts and objectivity. Right? Not necessarily. The truth is, scientists are people just like us, and as such are just as capable of shortcomings, bias, and pushing agendas. Scientists, in a word, can be bought just like anyone else. And if this new book is anything to go by, there is a lot of buying going on.”

Climategate is just another example of all this. It tells us a lot about advocacy research, politicised science, and researchers selling themselves to the highest bidder. And it tells us a lot about the science of manmade climate change. As one clever letter writer to the Australian expressed it, “The release of hacked emails between climate scientists shows that the evidence for man-made global warming could possibly be . . . er . . . man-made.”

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/rorting-data-is-hell-nino/story-e6frfhqf-1225803452749

[1587 words]

22 Replies to “Rogue Science and Biased Media”

  1. Thanks Bill for faithfully searching out the truth and keeping us informed. What might be the main purpose behind such a determined deception I wonder, and the answer I come to is – Nothing good !
    Clearly a world in such danger would need to be properly controlled by a wise few who “understood” the situation.
    May the Holy Spirit direct the outcome at Copenhagen and save us from self-appointed guardians.
    Anna Cook

  2. Thanks Anna

    Money is a big part of all this. Governments are the main sources of science research grants and funding, and obviously if your career and livelihood are tied up in this, you won’t get a lot of money if you claim there are no problems. But if you push gloom and doom scenarios, you will get heaps of funding.

    Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

  3. Those of us already acutely aware of how science has been corrupted and distorted to prop-up the false paradigm of evolution, can easily conceive how the same methods are being employed to prop-up the AGW theory. So it’s not a big leap for us to be skeptical of all this talk of a “scientific consensus” on man-made global warming. However those, including many church leaders, who have gullibly accepted evolution as an objective fact, seem to have great difficulty in believing that scientists are not the objective and infallible experts they imagine them to be.

    Ewan McDonald.

  4. I see the Lord’s fingerprints all over this scam of AGW being exposed. Remember, about 90% of scientists believe the silly fairy-story of the THEORY of evolution. When you have the lesbian Penny Wong and the homosexual Bob Brown behind an idea, how can you expect anything reliable to come forth? Call me bigotted, call me a homophobe, call me what you like, but I happen to know that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, and that the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.
    Ian Brearley

  5. Apart from Evolution and AGW the other big scientific scam, which seems to have been forgotten, in the heat of the moment, is Cloning and Embryonic Stemcell Research. How many cures were promised? How many have been realised? Zero.
    Dunstan Hartley

  6. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome for scientists, greenies and politicians. They have fallen in love with the the thing they think is trying to harm them, if only they can turn the climate from its destructive path they will find redemption and peace.

    Of course it’s also about the money and the leftist power grabbing agenda.

    Phil Twiss

  7. The ETS has proved one thing. When you put enough money behind something you can convince the world of almost anything. if your going to tell a lie, tell a big one and keep telling it

    Anyone with any commonsense should have had doubts of the concept of this model so heavily pushed by the big end of town. By 2004 the hypothesis was known to be flawed yet people felt they had to do something for the environment and seemed to confuse this logic with the then flawed theory of man made global warming

    As you know I have been campaigning against the ETS since before the 2007 election and every time I spoke to crowds, I was thought to be anti the environment.which is nonsense It seems that our youth have been conditioned to think that the west is destroying the environment (which is not the case) and that they should be punished for doing so.

    So the money machine has exploited this idea, and people seem to want to accept the idea of additional taxes for punishment as being the norm. Even in private schools this concept has been pushed by the green movement so strongly that I even had to make complaints about the political interference and propaganda being openly promoted and pushed.

    The one thing that is disappointing is the coalition and its support of this tax and trade scheme. They should have been the defence between ideology and logic. This seems to have failed, and one can only hope now on the Senate blocking this. I hope everyone reading this is constantly communication with our senators and demanding that they perform their duty and not fall in behind Malcolm Turnbull who seems to have a vested interest As for the ALP senators, I have been trying for years and am now convinced thata vote for an ALP Senator is a useless vote and they will not stand up and be heard. In other words a rubber stamp for the lower house.

    Tony Zegenhagen
    Qld State Secretary,Democratic Labor Party

  8. Talking of scientific ‘consensus’ – in the early 20th century 90-95% of scientists believed in the theory of eugenics. Today that number would be in the low single digits. All this would suggest that most of the scientific profession are gullible sheep and are cowed into accepting the fashions of the day lest they be ostracised and made outcasts. It is often said that if you invoke God in the cause of evil people will uncritically come to the cause. Science has certainly taken that mantle in the time since the ‘enlightenment’ – just say that something is ‘science’ (with the added notion of ‘consensus’) and people will do the most stupefying and irrational things in the service of such a cause. Having been an adherent of theistic evolution up until recently I can attest to such blind faith which I held only because of the tremendous weight of ‘consensus’.

    Francis Kesina, Canberra

  9. Penny Wong and Bob Brown willfully ignored science when the sciences showed that they got Homosexuality wrong: the same goes for ‘Climate Gate’.
    Stan Fishley

  10. Al Gore buys his carbon offsets from himself – the Generation Investment Management LLP which is an independent private owner-managed partnership established in 2004 of which Gore is both Chairman and founding partner.
    The IPCC is the scientific arm of the UNFCCC. However, the IPCC conducts no scientific research, yet it represents itself as the final word on climate change which has now been exposed.
    I seem to remember that a Korean scientist who dabbled in stem cells research and presented false findings was banned. It will be interesting to see the outcome of the now exposed people who have led many to believe that the end is nigh for us if we don’t pay more taxes to governments under the guise of the ETS.
    Madge Fahy

  11. Hi Bill,

    I have to agree with you in that the MSM here is Aus is just pathetic. They always appear to be in a close relationship with whoever is in power. Having to listen to Turnbull parrot on about the dire need to save the planet was just depressing… only then to realize that he is just a lawyer. Same goes for Wong, another lawyer.

    Some more data to add to the list. I now believe that there is man made warming. Man changes the numbers to show us all it is getting warmer….

    http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_nz2.pdf

    Ben Green

  12. Bill – just catching up after a week full of meetings.

    A caution for Ian Brearley (and probably Stan Fishley too): identifying Sens Penny Wong and Bob Brown as homosexual may be the truth (and by their own admission), but is strictly speaking an ad hominem attack and not logically sustainable.

    There are many who are not homosexual and yet who hold to the AGW theory, and I dare say it is possible for some homosexuals to have a blind spot on that point while seeing clearly that the AGW theory is false.

    Let’s stick to the real facts, and the proper logical arguments to make our case.

    John Angelico

  13. Here’s an interesting article on one of the US MSM sites.
    http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/entry5761180.shtml

    If you view it on Lewrockwell.com some great links show up, including one EastAngliaEmails.com which has an exhaustive list of the emails.
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/mccullagh3.1.1.html

    I wonder how long the others are going to be able to keep a lid on this. I think at some point there are going to be a lot of silly looking people.

    Phil Twiss

  14. Except to say John, that it is an indictment on how far our society has fallen that we have openly homosexual people occupying some of the highest offices in our land. Remember former High Court justice Kirby too.

    Ewan McDonald.

  15. If anything climatological happens soon, it may well be a mini-ice-age.

    This looks like another dead horse (like swine flu) for the pundits to whip, while the powers-that-be get on with taking away practically every right or authority we have.

    Leon Brooks

  16. Dear Bill, Only someone who has been moved by the Holy Spirit could write like this so you must love and please Him immensely. It is a gift He has given you and we thank God for it. It has also inspired some very wise comments from your readers which I intend to make full use of. If the Social Darwinists had not blindly followed Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution the aboriginal people of this nation would not have suffered so much but most people do not realise that. I was at a meeting years ago when the ‘stolen generation’ issue was in full swing as our church [Catholic] was right into it and I brought this up. The aboriginal speaker seemed to agree with me but did not seem to understand it enough to talk about it so I felt the point I made was sadly lost on many in the audience. The priest did not clarify things either which I thought he should have done. Apparently they used forms from the department of flora and fauna to decide how much aboriginal blood children on stations etc had. Whether they were quarter caste, half caste etc etc. This was the criteria they used to decide whether to bring them up in a white society which meant removing them from their mothers. If full bloodedness had not been an issue, because of Darwin’s theory, why wouldn’t the full bloods have been removed as well? It is because Social Darwinists used Darwin’s theory to prove that the aboriginal race was a weaker race and would eventually die out of its own accord. Also why would a government department dealing with aboriginal issues use forms meant to deal with the issues of flora and fauna if full blooded aboriginals had not been thought to belong to this category? It is the same with the theory on climate change. World socialism wants to use this theory to impose its socialist agenda which is a world religion, [worship of Gaia] a world government, [ through the UN] a world economy, [which will be more human] multiculturalism [unrestrained immigration] etc etc. All it will achieve is a totalitarian dictatorship. The days when socialism was influenced by Christianity is long gone I am afraid. God Bless always,
    Pat Halligan

  17. I have just read on Andrew Bolt’s blog about Jon Faine’s excuse for not mentioning the climate emails. He gives his “reason” as follows:
    “It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully… It was a small, even a tiny fragment of a sidebar of a secondary issue to the edge of the periphery of something people were talking about other than the main game.”

    This is not merely pathetic but amounts to sheer malfeasance. Here is a media outlet styled as “Your ABC” which refuses to report anything which it deems inconvenient, and in conceited, elitists terms fends off any who would dare object. I didn’t hear talk like that from Mr Faine in regard to “Children overboard”, or the AWB scandal, or the scandals surrounding John Elliott. “Our ABC” (ha-ha) is in the news suppression business – for their own ends, and not the news reporting business!

    This scandal is not merely about the scientists – Chris Monckton said about them, “They are not merely bad scientists, they are crooks”; the scandal is about the very people who should be in the business of exposing it – the media!

    Murray Adamthwaite

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